Petaluma Hills Brewing Company is closing (and Jan Brady is Hawt) *updated*

*UPDATE* Spoiler: You’re too late
Due to extenuating circumstances, Petaluma Hills Brewing Company closed on Sunday, June 18th. We were there — Jazz, Lisa, and me. The mood was resigned, but still ebullient. More folks with kids stopped by and there were more dogs, too; it was as if people wanted to stop by one last time even if they couldn’t find a babysitter. I got a growler of Dated 1848. My last. For now…

So I don’t bury the lede, let me start by saying if you’re reading this before June 30th, 2017 and you have any way to get to Petaluma Hills Brewing Company — right across the street from Lagunitas — go. If you’ve been putting it off, go. If reading this strikes your fancy and you wonder whether you shoul– just go.
If, on the other hand, you are reading this after June 30th, then I am so sorry: we lost a good one.
Let me also state that I never intended to fall in love with Petaluma Hills. I’d had a number of their beers in bombers and found them always enjoyable, but never counted them as a don’t-miss kinda place (Spoiler: don’t miss them). That was until the fateful “Petaluma Beer Crawl,” I did with Lisa and Jazz a few months back. The plan was simple — start at 101 North Brewing (more on them in a different post), walk to Petaluma Hills, and  finish at Lagunitas; they’re all within a couple blocks of each other. Did you see the order there?  Petaluma Hills was the middle child, the Jan Brady of the bunch, a buffer between the precocious 101 North and the mature Lagunitas.
…Until we got there. 101 North is precocious, make no mistake. And Lagunitas is mature to a fault. But stepping into Petaluma Hills felt like stepping into your favorite buddy’s party barn – comfy couch, dart board, board games, great bar… But your buddy doesn’t likely have this many beers on tap. And they DEFINITELY don’t have this many on nitro.
First, let’s talk about what that means. Most beers (read: almost all) use carbon dioxide to make their beer fizzy. “Nitro” refers to nitrogen which replaces the carbon dioxide as the fizzy-ing gas. What’s the big deal? There’s a much better description of the science involved here but suffice it to say beers with nitrogen carbonation have a more creamy mouth feel. It’s most commonly associated with Guinness stout, so when you can try it with, say, an IPA… it’s a fantastic experience. Especially when you can try both side by side — which you can at Petaluma Hills.
Now you’re starting to see that Jan is really the hawt one. And you’re right.
On my most recent visit with Jazz and Lisa, I started with my favorite IPA of theirs, Dated 1858, on standard CO2 carbonation. Then, later, I had that exact same beer on nitro. The difference was spectacular — that creamy mouth feel I mentioned was at the forefront but it mellowed out the sharpness associated with a California hop-forward IPA. And that may not be for everyone, but it’s absolutely worth trying and I wouldn’t have had that opportunity outside of visiting their taproom.
But Petaluma Hills is closing June 30th.
If you’re wondering why such a fantastic place with so many great offerings is closing even while new breweries are opening or expanding in the area, it comes down to money, or poorly-spent/not-enough capital. This article in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat  lays it all out pretty clearly. If you read between the lines, there’s a strong suggestion that not all these breweries that have popped up over the last few years will be here in 3 or 5 years. We’re absolutely living in a golden era of craft brews, and if there’s a takeaway from Petaluma Hills Brewing Company it’s that we should visit them before they’re gone because many do bring something new or something special. Enjoy them while we can! Carpe Diem!
Obviously this philosophy extends beyond brewpubs (please go hug those you love, you know, just in case), but that’s the topic here. And, if I haven’t mentioned it before, Petaluma Hills Brewing Company closes at the end of June, so you should go. Now.

Finding Marbles

First I went to the wrong park …
No, first I had a big coffee when dropping Fern off at work. Normally, I’d know better — Public bathrooms in SF being ferociously rare. But the Starbucks had the Clover brewing system and this beautiful Rawanda blend that had glorious floral notes that are normally foreign in a Starbucks. So I wasn’t going to not finish it. I’d find a bathroom in the park – specifically, Dolores Park.
Nope, wrong park.
Okay, but to figure that out I first systematically circled the block, found a great parking space, looked down on the beautiful park and thought, “huh?” This park is not old. At least not old like I’m looking for. A quick Google explained the problem, which you already know: wrong park.
I wanted Buena Vista Park. Fortunately it was a short drive away. Parking was another story. I circled the park but the only space I could find was on the south end. So be it. I started up the stairs… and more stairs. And more stairs. AND MORE STAIRS. Oh my god, did these stairs ever end?

So. Many. Stairs.

Eventually they did, and from the top I found the main path leading around the park. More importantly, I found the gravestones I was looking for almost immediately:

Rest in Peace, Lo Ca

In 1900 San Francisco passed an ordinance forbidding any new burials within the city limits. No new burials means no new money for upkeep, and by 1914 the sprawling cemeteries in the Richmond district had become overgrown. The City ordered the bodies to be moved so the increasingly valuable land could be developed. A series of lawsuits followed (shocking) and the bodies didn’t actually start being moved until the ‘30s. But it wasn’t free. If you had a loved one buried in one of the cemeteries it’d cost you $10 (roughly $175 today) to get them moved south to one of the new cemeteries in Colma. If family didn’t have the money, or, more commonly, there was no family to be found (remember, by this point no one had been buried there for more than thirty years), then the body went to one of several mass graves (they were orderly — each body had a separate chamber). And the gravestones and monuments left behind? If no one claimed them, the city did. Some went to erosion control at Ocean Beach, some went to build Aquatic Park, and others went to build gutters in — you guessed it — Buena Vista Park.
Walking the wide paths, the gutters lined in bone-white marble marble stood out. I had heard that a few of the gravestones were installed inscription-side up and I was glad to find at least one example pretty quickly. I’d seen pictures of better examples, and I intended to find them. First, though, I needed a bathroom. I hiked the path down to the border along Haight Street, thinking it’d be there. Nope. I Googled it, and it looked like there was a restroom in the north-eastern corner. Back up the stairs.
I finally found a building… but no bathrooms. I was starting to get desperate. I spotted a Park Services worker and inquired as to whether there was a bathroom. There were no bathrooms. “Crazy, right?” he said. “Especially when this park is 37 acres!” Crazy indeed.
But I still had to pee. And I was even more desperate.
It is pretty wooded….
I climbed up into the thick woods on an unpaved path that looked a little overgrown and unused…
And then I thought about all the signs warning about coyotes in the park…
And then I thought about all the homeless wandering around the park…
And even though this path led through the woods, there didn’t look like the path ranged far enough to be out of site from all the paved paths where old women walked Pomeranians…
Desparate times…
I started hiking up the eastern side of the park. The gutters on this side of the park were no longer bone-white; these gutters were constructed with regular stones. Ahead loomed the top of the stairs I’d come up. Before I reached it, though, a German Shepard-sized coyote jogged across the path ahead of me, slowing just enough to look down at me giving me a look that said, “I know”…
My time was up — I had to meet an old friend across town. And I didn’t find a bathroom or a better example of a tombstone. I’ll be back, and I’ll make sure to skip the coffee.

When The Internet Fails Me (at an impossible task at a ridiculous hour)

Thursday, 2:45am — It’s supposed to replace our brains, right? Middle of the night, song fragment runs through my head. Ancient history. What is it called?! Not much to go on, I’ll grant you that – a fleeting memory so ephemeral I can’t hum it but it keeps naggingly drifting in and out on the periphery of memory… I think there’s the word “vampire” in the title. Too broad a search… related songs? For some reason I’m hearing it on a mixtape I made with…. oh! Bad Religion‘s “Stranger Than Fiction”! Yes, that’s a start! Something I can work with. 1994. Okay. But listening to that track reminds me it teansitioned into Counting Crows‘ “Einstein On The Beach” (why the hell can I remember that kind of thing? From a mixtape I made in 1994?! Really?!). Google doesn’t help me with “songs around 1994 with the word vampire in the title”. Semantic web, my ass!
Now I’ve been up too long, even that wisp of a melody has evaporated like a barely-remembered dream. All I’ve got is  the word “vampire” in the title (maybe) and somewhere around 1994…
(Aside: my friend Lisa and I decided that the 90’s will perpetually be “about ten years ago.” Because, seriously, it feels like about ten years ago… sort of… in the same way that everything a couple hours away is “a couple hundred miles” whether you’re talking about Sacramento, Reno, or Nebraska.)
The dog implores me just to shut up and go to sleep. Too late. I pull out the big guns: the binder with my old CDs:

Now it doesn’t feel like “about ten years ago,” it feels like an archeological dig. Sifting through artifacts left all but forgotten in a binder on a shelf out of the way. But it’s no good — there’s no organization here and it spans too great a time in my life. Not that that’s something I have any intention of doing.


Organizing a record collection biographically still sounds… I don’t know, nostalgically romantic. To do the same thing with CDs lacks that sort of gravitas, it’s like preparing a “Paint-by-numbers” exhibition at the Louvre. Don’t get me wrong, there was some good music in the 90’s, but the CD’s time, in hindsight, seems so limited. Purists will quibble with dates, but the heyday of the CD lasted barely a decade — the 90’s — after which Napster effectively ushered in the Fall of The Roman Empire for the recording industry by showing us that, technologically, we didn’t need shiny, damageable plastic platters to listen to music. Yes, yes, you can still buy CDs, it’s better fidelity, blah blah blah. But the truth is that the CD is synonomous with a very limited scope of music, chronologically-speaking, whereas the vinyl LP stretches from the goddamn Beatles until present day — and you’re not going to see a nostalgic renaissance for CDs. No one will cry on that grave except the music executives who got away with charging twice the amount of an LP for a medium that literally cost a fraction of the price to manufacture.
But I digress…
Even the wispy trails of the melody are gone now. Winston has opportunistically taken my side of the bed. I’m giving up for now, as soon as I can shove his hundred-pound frame onto the far side of the bed.